Mathieu Blondel

My project proposal “Japanese/Chinese handwriting recognition on Maemo” has been accepted for this year’s edition of the Google Summer of Code. Yay ! :-) You can see my original proposal here.

I am very excited about this project because it combines several of my great interests:
- free software
- Japanese and Chinese languages
- embedded

Without getting into the nitty-gritty of the Japanese and Chinese languages, to input characters, users have to use a so-called input-method. They type the pronunciation of the character and select it in a list. However, with literally thousands of characters, it happens, even to native speakers, to be unable to read a character. In this event, the input method cannot be used. Handwriting recognition is a nice answer to that problem especially since Nokia internet tablets feature a touchscreen and a stylus.

Above is a screenshot of tomoe in action under Debian GNU/Linux. The challenge of this project will be to bring tomoe to Maemo with particular focus on good integration into the platform. As you can see, the drawing area is divided into four squares that help draw the character correctly. The stroke numbers are displayed because they are very important for tomoe to find the correct character (roughly, characters have to be drawn from left to right and from top to bottom). You can undo/redo the last stroke. A list of possible candidates is displayed. This list is updated when the search button is pushed or, if the option is enabled, on each stroke. This latter option is useful because this way you can find your character without drawing it completely.

Here is the program timeline:
- May 28: beginning of the project
- July 9: code upload to code.google.com/hosting and mid-term evaluations
- August 20: code upload to code.google.com/hosting and final evaluations

I am very eager to work on this project and especially, I am looking forward to working with Makoto Sugano, my mentor on this project. I would like to thank him for becoming my mentor. I think I will learn a lot from him as well as from the Maemo community. I am also very grateful to Luc Pionchon thanks to whom I got a discounted Nokia N800.

Note: Three other Maemo projects have been selected including a project on Ruby bindings. This project is of particular interest for me because it would allow me to port Fantasdic to Maemo. :-)

I saw people offering free hugs in Lille today. Amazing :-)

If you get segmentation faults every time you run apt-get and apt-cache, try to delete /var/cache/apt/*.bin and then run “apt-get update”. It should make the trick.

It is not easy to explain the following with plain sentences so let’s take an example. Say I want to translate the following paragraph from English to French:

Tokyo is known for its many museums. Located in [[Ueno Park]] are the [[Tokyo National Museum]], the country's largest museum and specializing in traditional [[Japanese art]]; the National Museum of Western Art; and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, which contains collections of Japanese [[modern art]] as well as over 10,000 Japanese and foreign films.

In order to complete the translation, I will need the French article name for [[Ueno Park]], [[Tokyo National Museum]], [[Japanese art]] etc. Seeking all those names is quite boring and time-consuming, isn’t it ? So I have written a little tool in Ruby that does that for us. In this very example, the program would have output:


----------
Ueno_Park: interwiki link to fr found (Parc de Ueno)
Tokyo_National_Museum: interwiki link to fr found (Musée national de Tōkyō)
Japanese_art: interwiki link to fr found (Art japonais)
modern_art: interwiki link to fr found (Art moderne)
----------
Tokyo is known for its many museums. Located in [[Parc de Ueno]] are the [[Musée national de Tōkyō]], the country's largest museum and specializing in traditional [[Art japonais]]; the National Museum of Western Art; and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, which contains collections of Japanese [[Art moderne]] as well as over 10,000 Japanese and foreign films.


More explanations and download here.

Un dossier intéressant sur le Monde diplomatique.

Comme je n’ai pas beaucoup écrit quand j’étais en Chine, je vais essayer d’écrire un peu quand des anecdotes me reviennent. En voici quelques-unes en vrac :

- Il arrive souvent que les Chinois appellent une autre personne “oncle”, “tante”, “grand/petit frère”, “grande/petite soeur” même s’ils n’ont aucun lien de famille entre eux… Ce sont des surnoms affectifs. On retrouve un peu la même chose en Corée et au Japon. Si on le sait pas, on pourrait croire que ces personnes ont un lien de famille entre elles alors que ce n’est pas du tout le cas ^^'’ !

- Dans les cybercafés en Chine, on voit souvent des jeunes regarder des films devant leur écran d’ordinateur. La raison pour cela est que peu de films occidentaux sont autorisés à être projetés dans les salles de cinéma et donc le choix se limite souvent aux films chinois et hongkongais. Les cybercafés sont donc un bon moyen d’accéder à un plus large choix et à la culture occidentale.

- On voit souvent des couples ensemble sur un vélo. Le garçon pédale et la fille est assise sur le porte-bagage. Plutôt romantique ^^'’.

- Il est très fréquent de voir deux filles se donner la main dans la rue. Cela ferait un peu lesbien en France mais c’est tout à fait accepté en Chine. Cela signifie seulement qu’elles sont de très bonnes copines. Encore une fois, je pense que c’est la même chose en Corée et au Japon. Dans une moindre mesure, on peut parfois voir deux hommes, chacun avec le bras sur l’épaule de l’autre.

- En général, dans les restaurants pas trop chers, les Chinois commandent et payent tout de suite avant de commencer le repas.

- Contrairement à la croyance populaire et si on en croit mes amis chinois, peu de Chinois mangent de la viande de chien… Beaucoup trouvent même cela complètement horrible.

- Vers 17h le soir, devant des restaurants, j’ai souvent vu des réunions se dérouler. Les employés, en uniforme, sont tous alignés et devant eux, le manager leur donne les instructions de la soirée. On a du mal à comprendre si cela vient de l’influence capitaliste/manageriale ou plutôt de l’esprit communiste. ;-)

French people are sometimes said to be rude and arrogant… Some tourists may feel that because of the culture shock : our societies have simply different rules and different codes.

If you consider the French language itself, there are a few hints about the underlying French code of politeness. For example, you may talk to someone using “tu” (you) or “vous” (polite you). Incidentally, foreigners learning French usually have troubles to master the difference between “tu” and “vous” and it is difficult for them to choose the appropriate one regarding the situation.

When French people enter a shop, most of them say “Bonjour” (Hello) and when they leave, they say “Merci, au revoir” (Thanks, good bye). I am not sure it is the same everywhere in the world.

Likewise, in English, it would sound way too much if you said “Hello Sir” or “Hello Madam” to all the people you meet but it is very frequent in French (”Bonjour Monsieur, Bonjour Madame”).

I am writing about this because as I am getting older, adults now talk to me using “vous” (polite you) and kids call me “Monsieur” (Sir). Even though it happens quite often, I am always somewhat surprised about that… Hehe ;-)

So after you buy a train ticket online through voyages-sncf.com, you are forced to receive a weekly newsletter. This is illegal since in France, users have to give their permission before being subscribed.

To put it further, in order to unsubscribe, you have to enter the starting date and the ending date of your “unsubscription”, that is to say you have to enter when you will start receiving this letter again. Funny…